In a fix of ink, Cecilia Martinez-Gil’s second full-length collection of poems, life, death, and desire comingle on the page in passionate and innovative experimentations. In these fully ripe poems, poetry itself rules—it is the meeting place of beauty and intellect, of play and the imagination. Uruguayan poet Martinez-Gil, writing authoritatively and with great agility in her second language, offers hard-earned wisdom and insight in this book, ultimately inviting the reader to believe that ” . . . we are desires transpired from thought to life.” This is precisely the kind of revelation we most urgently need to hear, what we most need to have our poets fix in ink on the page. Brava, Cecilia!
-Gail Wronsky, author of So Quick Bright Things
“Reject the angel, give the muse a kick,” said Lorca. “The true struggle is with the duende.” So when a fix of ink begun as momentary fastening winds up feeling more like a permanent, pinching predicament, it’s time to find a way “to gallop and gallop / in an unsaddled unreined flight.” Jeremiad becomes journey as inner/outer fragments fly into fascinating, kaleidoscopic, finally blessed iterations. Volcanic, harrowing, painful, playful, full-bodied and also as delicately synesthetic as moments of “suspended lotus, / fluctuating water lilies,” Cecilia Martinez-Gil’s devastating second full-length first un-fixes on the way to that better, more generous, more commodious meaning of the verb: to mend, to heal, to put back together, as what has been corseted emerges when properly cosseted into “forgetting not / what’s to be alive, / how to stay /alive.”
-Sarah Maclay, author of Music for the Black Room
In this remarkable collection of poems, Cecilia Martinez-Gil deftly sketches the genome of human written expression, tracing our creative journey from ancient times to modern places. The cave walls of the past, the blank pages of the present and the digital bytes of the future are, like moth and flame, the siren calls of our imagination. Martinez-Gil artfully captures the eternal tension between void and the human need and desire to fill it, awarding us with a kind of dreamscape where touches of ink fix us in time and place: here, there, past, present, and future.
-David S Whitley, author of Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit
Cecilia Martínez-Gil is a force of nature. With A fix of ink, she tackled a seemingly impossible task, spanning characters with multiple identities moving across real and imaginary planes. Her poems inhabit the realms of the deepest recesses of the soul and the immaterial world of cyberspace. In her hand, language mutates and takes on hybrid forms like an endless shapeshifter out of Ovid´s Metamorphoses. Her book sheds much needed light on what it means to live, love, breathe, and create in the digital age.
— Veronica Pamoukaghlian Writer, Filmmaker, Poet
http://afixofink.com/#readers-responses
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Martinez-Gil artfully and fearlessly bares her soul, heart, power and frailty in this body of work. She engages readers with profound insight, significant questions and, at times, steamy eros, simultaneously challenging them to keep up with her. a fix of ink will surely transfix and is likely to become a fixture of New World poetry-gone-prose.
—Christian Fattoruso, Musician, Poet
http://afixofink.com/#readers-responses
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
“An alchemist of the new millennium, Cecilia offers her poetry to an unsuspecting audience in the form of a neutral compound, ready to react with whatever agent the reader may interpose, and resulting in reactions that are as varied as they are often surprising. She delivers her poems to the reader as if as mirrors – mirrors that not only reflect our true selves but also reveal parts of us that may have forever remained undiscovered, but for the lighting, the color, and the aspect her words provide.”
—Elizabeth Stone, Real Estate Lawyer
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Mario Padilla –
To read Cecilia Martinez-Gil’s A Fix of Ink is like reading “side splitting…metaphors of dreams within a dream.” Her collection is not an easy read, for Martinez-Gil is a poet who delights in language and critical thought that will challenge you, defy you to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats advises and whom she reflects on in her poem “Catharsis” in the same stanza as Robert DiNiro, Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Moreover, Martinez-Gil is a poet who knows language, the English language, perhaps better than native speakers. We find “paradigm,” “oxymoron,” “bipolarity,” “hyperbole” and “insentience” in the same five-line stanza. Don’t expect to think necessarily, but more to feel your way through these poems, as with the best jazz music, because, for her, writing must feel like an improvisation, though never composed like one—she is in control of every line, every word… Words become building blocks to her Tower of Babel, then wind up in various forms: spoken word, verse poetry, prose poem, concrete poetry, alliterative flights of fancy (“Abecedarian”), blogging poem, email poem, until finally, words, like kites, go airborne, fixing the sky with ink. Indeed, in her poetry, a Fountain Pen of Ink creates illusions, a choreography of words “freefalling on [the] page,” As a poet, she is constantly deconstructing the poem, down to words, down to letters, and finally down to the blank spaces into which letters form words of ink—symbols fixed into forms that we might decipher, like hieroglyphics—creating some of the most dynamic, inventive and challenging poetry I’ve read in years.
Mario René Padilla Poet, Playwright, Creative Writing Teacher